Private Practice

The hot-to-trot pleasures of “Masters of Sex.”

Masters and Johnson, who were intellectual partners and lovers, produced a best-selling study that blasted through medical prudery.Credit Illustration by Marc Aspinall

“Masters of Sex,” a new hour-long drama on Showtime, is a fizzy, ebullient quasi-historical romp about the team of scientific pioneers who transformed American attitudes toward sex. But let’s not bury the lead: it’s also a serious turn-on.

For many viewers, this will be reason enough to watch, and there’s no shame in that game; this is adult cable television’s bread and butter, after all. Luckily, the show has an appeal beyond solid date-night viewing. “Masters of Sex” is based on Thomas Maier’s lively 2009 book of the same title, which tells the story of the rise of William Masters, a renegade who aimed to study sex in the lab, using human subjects. In nineteen-fifties St. Louis, where Masters was a prominent ob-gyn, this was an idea outrageous enough that he had to keep the project secret. Then, almost by chance, Masters found his soul mate. Virginia Johnson was a low-level secretary with no college degree, but she had social skills that the doctor lacked, in addition to a spitfire sexual iconoclasm. The two became intellectual partners and, later, lovers—though few knew about that part until many years afterward. Their best-selling 1966 study blasted through medical prudery and Freudian hornswoggle, explaining the physiology of orgasms, spreading the good word about healthy sexuality, and turning them into national celebrities.

This sounds like a romantic, upbeat story, and at times “Masters of Sex” does have a caper-plot element, as Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) flirts with doctors and nurses in the hospital, convincing them to “do it” for science. The sex scenes are graphic and often very funny, with classic Showtime panache, and they star people you definitely want to see having sex (or, in many cases, masturbating with sensors pasted to their skin, as the doctors murmur things like “Turgidity of nipples”). In its stylish pilot, “Masters of Sex” initially comes off a bit like “Mad Men with Benefits”: fetishistic fun with a historical pedigree. But over the first six episodes, the show deepens by degrees, becoming more poignant, and more surprising, too. It begins to acknowledge some of the unsettling implications of the doctor’s work, and lets characters who start as entertaining cartoons gain complexity, taking the plot in new directions.

When we first meet him, Masters (Michael Sheen) has begun his sex study without official permission: he’s been paying a skeptical prostitute to let him watch through a keyhole, while he takes notes on positions and duration. His interest seems fuelled by equal parts radical scientific curiosity and radical innocence. “Is that a common practice amongst prostitutes?” he asks, astonished by the revelation that his subject has faked an orgasm to speed up a customer. “It’s a common practice amongst anyone with a twat,” she replies.

Masters is married to a lovely woman named Libby (the charming Caitlin FitzGerald), and they are struggling with infertility—he’s made her believe it’s her fault, when, in fact, he knows that he has a low sperm count. At the university hospital where he works, the doctor’s kindness to his patients coexists with a peevish, shut-down air of arrogance, the native entitlement of a big-shot doctor of his era. Then Johnson arrives, a former night-club singer, twice divorced, a single mother of two kids—a worldly woman seeking a sense of purpose. As Masters’s assistant, she handles all the administration and much of the design of the study, but her effect on him is stronger than those roles would suggest. Heterodox and bold in her manner, she’s a destabilizing force whose charisma acts like a magnet, spinning every moral compass into a panic. And yet, despite her bravado, she’s under society’s thumb, too: she needs to keep this job.

The show departs in several key ways from the true story, blurring chronology and conflating characters, and adding in one or two questionable twists for the sake of drama. In a few cases, it makes events less strange than they were in reality: in the actual experiments, anonymous couples mated with paper bags over their heads. (Later on, Masters’s mother helpfully sewed silk masks.) These early episodes briskly sketch out a fraught fifties milieu, including the sub-rosa doctor-nurse hookup scene; the lonely Masters marriage, and its origins in Masters’s unhappy childhood; and Johnson’s struggles with her irresponsible ex (the hilarious Mather Zickel) and her son, who begins to hate her for neglecting him.

Along the way, we get a sense of the ebb and flow of Masters and Johnson’s research, which began to bump up against charged social questions, like homosexuality and the then-accepted Freudian notion that vaginal climax was more “mature.” There are satisfyingly silly comic set pieces, including a flirtation between a blond nurse and a doctor who are paired for study, as well as a few on-the-nose bits reminiscent of a conventional medical drama. The dialogue isn’t always subtle, but it’s often sharp. (When a chagrined cad deflowers a virgin, he moans, “It’s like those signs you see in thrift shops. You break it, you buy it.”) A few episodes in, Allison Janney shows up to give an affecting performance as the university provost’s wife.

For all the show’s appeal, none of this would work without Lizzy Caplan, the swizzle stick in the show’s erotic cocktail. In previous roles, Caplan has stood out as a modern girl, all defensive postures and tomboy sarcasm. On the cult TV classic “Party Down,” she was a jittery cater-waiter; in the underestimated dark movie comedy “Bachelorette,” a self-destructive hipster; in “Mean Girls,” a furious goth. But in “Masters of Sex” she’s chilled out and self-possessed, the type of woman who turns everything she says into an intelligent come-on, even when that’s not her intent. With her elegant nose and amused eyes, black-slash eyebrows and warm mouth, she’s like a pen-and-ink illo of herself. At times, the script can be a bit worshipful of the character—“that woman is magic,” one voice-over coos—but Caplan is watchable enough to override that flaw. And it’s a fascinating conception of a female superhero: her libido is a superpower, one she tries to use for good rather than evil, with mixed results.

Since the era when the Bada Bing girls writhed reliably, each Sunday night, in the background of Tony Soprano’s business meetings, cable television has adopted, if not an actual Madonna/whore complex, something approaching a Gallant/Goofus one. The most artistically prestigious series, such as “The Wire,” “Breaking Bad,” and even “Mad Men,” might include sex or nudity, but they generally do so for some plot-based reason, not as keep-’em-watching titillation. The shows that deliver more graphic scenes, often at oddly predictable twenty-minute intervals—“Game of Thrones,” “Boardwalk Empire,” “True Blood”—share a slightly seamy quality, as if the boobs were contractually required product placement.

“Masters of Sex” threads this needle well. Sex is its subject, after all—and the show makes the case, beneath its cinematic lacquer, that it is not something merely exciting or trivial but a deep human necessity. Deprived of intimacy and true release, people shrivel up. “Once you’ve seen Oz, who wants to go back to Kansas?” one heartbroken character asks. In this way, “Masters of Sex” reminded me not of a few other Showtime series, with their mood of anomie and disdain, but of “Orange Is the New Black,” the Netflix series that, for all its comic bounce, takes sex seriously, as pleasure, power, and escape. These stories are humanistic, not cynical, and although they go in for a level of prurience, the nudity isn’t simply there to jump the needle on the viewer’s electrocardiogram. “Masters of Sex” may not be revolutionary TV, but it’s got something just as useful: good chemistry. ♦